Tiny Homes: The Next Little Thing

Steven Kurutz of The New York Times gives good exposure to the small house movement, "whose adherents believe in minimizing one's footprint — structural as well as carbon — by living in spaces that are smaller than 1,000 square feet and, in some cases, smaller than 100. Tiny houses have been a fringe curiosity for a decade or more, but devotees believe the concept's time has finally arrived.

"It's a very exciting moment," said Shay Salomon, a green builder in Tucson, Ariz., and the author of "Little House on a Small Planet" (Lyons Press, 2006), "because it feels like a chapter of American history might be ending, the chapter called 'Bigger is Better.'

Michael Cannell writes a related article in the Times about the growth in the market for upscale garden sheds:

"In terms of popularity, these sheds are roaring ahead, in part because of their innate simplicity," said Michael Sylvester, publisher of fabprefab.com, a clearinghouse of information about contemporary prefab homes. "They're mobbed whenever they're exhibited at design shows."

In fact, the shed threatens to upstage full-scale modernist prefab homes, which have begun to lose their bargain appeal after years of hype. ::New York Times

Steven Kurutz of The New York Times gives good exposure to the small house movement, "whose adherents believe in minimizing one's footprint &mdash; structural as well as carbon &mdash; by living in spaces that are smaller than 1,000 square feet and, in so